Monthly Update: May 2021
What a month it’s been! I feel like I start every update like that, but honestly it’s true every time. Forlorn progresses at a steady clip, and Part V is finally at a stage where it’s starting to all come together. The major hurdles of animation have been cleared, and aside from a handful of relatively simple shots, it’s on to animation polish, cloth sim, then getting everything in Unreal, lit, and rendered. And then there’s the final edit, and sound, and music…
When I spell it all out it seems like I’m not close at all, doesn’t it? Well, the point is I’m closer to completing Part V than I was this time last month. As predicted, Part V is the most complicated episode so far, with animation production taking roughly double the length compared to the previous episodes. Looking at things to come, Part VI might actually be something of a reprieve, being a little less complex in terms of all the moving pieces. But, as I may have said in the past, then comes Part VII, and oh boy, Part VII. That may take me six solid months of just animating, we shall see.
As of the last update I was feeling a little, for lack of a better word, frustrated at not being able to work on the project as much as I’d like. My regular job has been very busy as of late. The movie I’m working on has entered actually full fledged production, and as a result the amount of stuff I have to do as the Unreal Previsualization Lead has increased, and decreased has the time to turn it around. Thankfully I’m not swamped or anything, but it is draining, and it leaves me unable to do pretty much anything remotely artistic after work hours. Occasionally I’ll muster the strength to do something here or there, but with only animation left it requires a good deal of focus and energy, and there’s no point in working if you have neither of those. So, in my spare time I’ve been rewatching all the James Bond movies for the fourth or fifth time, and saving the work for the weekends.
This month I was able to make a real dent in Part V, however. As I mentioned before, pretty much all of the action, aside from a couple of small things at the end, are all around 80% animated. I have to smooth out some curves and do the details (fingers, toes, faces, etc.), but the bulk of the work is done. Usually the way I do things is I’ll animate a shot to completion and then slot it in the edit and move to the next, but because this episode is so action heavy it’s been useful to be a little more loose so I can make sure everything is cutting together before I go in and take the time to fill out the animation with details.
Another big hurdle that’s been accomplished this month is the the rig for Kaelis is finally complete! Conventional wisdom would say it’s not a good idea to wait until the fifth episode out of seven to finalize the rig for your main character, but it turns out I’m neither conventional nor wise. In all seriousness, this being the episode where Kaelis shows her face, I wanted to make sure it was up to my standards, and the Kaelis face model/ rig weren’t quite working for me. So, my wonderful wife wanted to help out, and she volunteered to take on a new facial rig after I had finished the remodel. Now it’s complete, and it’s simply wonderful. The ease of use and smoothness of the rig has made animating Kaelis’s face so much more engaging, and has opened up a lot of opportunity to push the expressiveness of her acting.
In addition to the new face, I used this time to spruce up her regular rig in a number of small ways. Her jacket now has some blend shapes that deform with her body, including the areas around her shoulders for natural looking deformation. Her pauldron now comes in pieces, with the largest piece having a bit of automation on it so it follows the arm without me having to animate it that often. I added in some additional joints to help make sure things never interpenetrate, and lastly I resculpted the torso to give Kaelis like 15% femininity. Even with the previous update, and the fact that her voice is clearly a woman’s, one of my friends still didn’t know she wasn’t a dude, so I thought it would be good to dial it in one more time. And without her helmet, it should be pretty darn obvious.
Tech talk - I did run into a rather annoying error when setting up her rig. To implement the blend shapes, I attached them to the spine joints using a set driven key, so when the spine bends a certain number of degrees in some direction, it activates said blend shape and the jacket deforms. And because there are so many shapes, each spine joint had a half dozen or so connections. But the problem I found, is apparently Unreal didn’t like multiple connections running through a joint, and was unable to recognize the rig for whatever reason. The way I ended up fixing it is instead of connecting the blend shape to the joint directly, I connected it to the controller, and since I almost exclusively use FK spine controls, it was basically the same thing. And so, after trial and error I got the rig in engine and I’ve been updating some of my shots with the older rig for the past week or so. You can see her now in the header image, in all of her resplendent glory!
The last piece of news for the month is I got my first vaccination shot, and it’s pushed me to try and do a bit more these past few weeks. I get my second this upcoming week, and after that I know I’m going to want to take some time to go outside and do human being type stuff for a bit. Having built up a lot of work means I can do that without feeling too bad about it. And with the Mass Effect rerelease, and Castlevania season 4, and other things I want to check out, it’ll be nice to be able to chill out without the prospect of unfinished work gnawing at my mind.
With these last few shots and a slew of revisions, along with rendering and sound, I’d say it’s a good six weeks until we might be seeing a finished episode, if not more. And that’s not counting music. But, as always, I will keep you posted on my goings ons. Until next month!
Alex
